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• W2133384737 abstract "“WHATEVER HAPPENS, THIS IS” : LESBIAN SPEECH-ACT THEORY AND ADRIENNE RICH’S “TWENTY-ONE LOVE POEMS COLETTE PETERS McMaster University I T h r o u g h o u t both her poetry and her prose, Adrienne Rich acknowledges “the dynamic between poetry as language and poetry as a kind of action, probing, burning, stripping, placing itself in dialogue with others out beyond the individual self” (Blood, Bread, and Poetry 181). In 1974, Rich published “Twenty-One Love Poems,” her first collection of poetry with explicit lesbian content. Since their publication now over twenty years ago, these poems have inspired a remarkably wide range of critical response, varying from complete denial of their lesbian content to complete acceptance of it. When I became interested in reading these poems, I was faced with the question of how to read them. Can Rich’s language be understood as a “kind of action,” as she suggests? Is there a possible connection between this poetic/linguistic action and Rich’s lesbianism? In order to answer these questions, I turned to J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory. Austin’s concept of performative language investigates the power of words to “do things” : to enact promises, bets, and ceremonies. As critic Sandy Petrey observes of performative language, “[tjhese words do things, they perform an action, their articulation is a creation” (4). The theoretical framework of this paper, then, is a fusion of lesbian theory and speech-act theory: as explicitly lesbian love poems, how can “Twenty-One Love Poems” be understood as a uniquely lesbian linguistic act? How might the past si­ lencing of lesbians inspire Rich’s view of poetry as a “kind of action” ? In order to answer these questions, I first contrast the problems of past criti­ cism with the potential of specifically lesbian criticism of “Twenty-One Love Poems.” After identifying the lesbian imperative that fuels Rich’s linguis­ tic action, I define lesbian speech-act theory, and read “ (THE FLOATING POEM UNNUMBERED)” from “Twenty-One Love Poems” from this per­ spective. Finally, a brief comparative reading of Daphne Marlatt’s “Booking Passage” from her most recent collection, Salvage, will demonstrate the po­ tential applications of lesbian speech-act theory beyond Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems.” As I have suggested, there has been an extraordinary range of response to “Twenty-One Love Poems,” particularly in dealing with their explicit lesbian content. The main problem that recurs in criticism is the tendency to universalize Rich’s lesbian experience in “Twenty-One Love Poems.” Claire Keyes, in her book The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich, claims that The “Love Poems” axe extraordinary not simply because they declare one woman’s love for another woman, but because they transcend sex. The poems are not narrowed by the focus on lesbian love but expanded. . . . Despite the specific focus and explicitness of poems such as these, the majority of the love poems achieve a universal significance. (170) Rich, however, does not want these to be universal but lesbian love poems. In a 1981 interview with Elly Bulkin, Rich describes her feelings after two heterosexual woman friends “wrote [her] about reading the Twenty-One Love Poems with their male lovers, assuring [her] how ‘universal’ the poems were” : I found myself angered, and when I asked myself why, I realized that it was anger at having my work essentially assimilated and stripped of its meaning, “integrated” into heterosexual romance. That kind of “accep­ tance” of the book seems to me a refusal of its deepest implications. . . . I see [it] as a denial, a kind of resistance, a refusal to read and hear what I’ve actually written, to acknowledge what I am. (qtd. in Werner 78-79) For Rich, the “deepest implications” of “Twenty-One Love Poems” lie not in their artistic merits, or lyrical qualities, but in their lesbianism. When critics praise the “universalism” of the poems as a compliment to Rich that her writing is able to transcend her lesbianism, they are missing the fact that “Twenty-One Love Poems” is about, and inextricable from, Rich’s les­ bianism. Similarly, Kevin McGuirk in his recent article “Philoctetes Radicalized: ‘Twenty-One Love Poems..." @default.
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• W2133384737 title "“Whatever Happens, This is”: Lesbian Speech-Act Theory and Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems”" @default.
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• W2133384737 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.1995.0042" @default.
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